How to Do Competitor Analysis in Content Marketing

Learning how to do competitor analysis in content marketing isn’t easy. It requires a significant amount of time and resources, which can be in short supply for busy content marketers. 

However, analyzing a competitor’s strengths and weaknesses can help you improve and differentiate your brand’s content, giving you a competitive edge. Even better, with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), it’s easier than ever.

Read on to learn what competitor analysis is, its benefits, the basics of performing one, and how you can leverage AI to speed up the process.

Key Takeaways (TL;DR)

• Competitor analysis in content marketing involves identifying and evaluating your competitor’s content strategies to inform your own.
• Performing a competitor analysis has several benefits, including gaining insights into how to differentiate and improve your content.
• There are five main steps to competitor analysis:
  • Identifying competitors
  • Finding their content
  • Performing a content audit
  • Assessing content quality
  • Evaluating SEO efforts
• You can use AI for competitor analysis to streamline data collection and analysis.

What Is Competitor Analysis? A Definition

Let’s start by clearing up a common misconception:

Competitor analysis is not about simply identifying and copying successful content marketing strategies.

Instead, competitor analysis in content marketing looks at the strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in your competitor’s content strategies. You can then use these insights to benchmark your brand’s performance and see where you can gain a competitive advantage.

What Are the Benefits of Competitor Analysis in Content Marketing?

There are several benefits to performing a competitor analysis in content marketing. Outside of just keeping tabs on the competition, you can gain insights to help you:

• Identify trends in your industry.
• Find content gaps.
• Differentiate and improve your content.
• Position your brand correctly in the marketplace.

For example, let’s say you’re in the healthcare industry, and during your competitor analysis, you find that your competitors are starting to create a lot of content on the role of AI content detection in healthcare. You can then note this emerging trend and start covering it on your website.

How to Do Competitor Analysis in Content Marketing in 5 Steps

Ready to see what kind of insights the competition has to offer? Follow the steps below to perform a basic competitor analysis in content marketing.

1. Identify your competitors

Before you can start the analysis, you need to identify the competition. They will typically fall into one of three categories:

• Primary competitors have the same audience and similar products, making them direct competition.
• Secondary competitors fall into the same general category as your business but offer different products or services.
• Tertiary competitors are indirect competitors but could become direct in the future.

This time, let’s say you sell sandals. A company that also sells sandals would be a direct primary competitor, while a brand that sells climbing shoes would be a secondary competitor.

2. Find content on competitor websites

Next, you should find where your competitors keep content on their websites. Smaller companies may keep it all in one easy-to-find “Blog” section, but larger websites may require more investigating.

Check for content in sections with titles like:

• Blog
• Resource Center
• Press Room
• News
• Case Studies

For example, a website’s “Resource Center” may be where they keep eBooks, whitepapers, and other types of long-form content that just don’t fit into their blog.

3. Perform a content audit

Now that you know where to look, it’s time to start auditing your competitors’ content. You want to answer three questions here:

• How many different types of content do they publish?
• How often do they publish each content type?
• What topics do they cover?

For example, you may find that a competitor publishes two blog posts daily each week, and many are on AI writing or technology. If you only post twice weekly and rarely cover AI topics, it may be a sign to ramp up your content creation efforts to be competitive.

4. Assess content quality

Of course, high-quality content writing is ideal for attracting and engaging readers, but quality expectations can vary by industry. By rating the quality of your competitor’s content, you can identify where you stand and what you can do to make your content stand out.

When assessing content quality, consider:

• Accuracy
• Depth
• Length
• Structure and readability
• Authors and their expertise
• Tone
• Visuals
• Use of AI

For example, let’s say you check a few articles on a competitor's site using an AI detector. If you find that the article is likely AI content and it's pretty thin, it could be a great opportunity to cover those same topics with original, human-written content on your site since Google penalizes unhelpful AI content.

5. Evaluate SEO strategies

Finally, a look into your competition’s SEO strategies can help inform your own attempts to rank on the search engine results pages (SERPs). If you can see what’s working for them and capitalize on the SEO opportunities they miss, you may be able to surpass them in the rankings.

When evaluating a competitor’s SEO efforts, look for:

• Keyword opportunities and new keywords you have yet to use on your site.
• The distribution of keywords in content, including page title, H1 tags, keyword density in the body, etc.
• Internal linking strategy.
• Backlinks.
• Monthly organic search traffic.

For example, if you find that a competitor has a lot of backlinks from authoritative sources, you may need to start putting more effort into your linking strategy.

Can You Use AI for Competitor Analysis?

As you can see, a complete competitor analysis can be a lot of work. Fortunately, you can use AI to help streamline the process in several ways.

For competitor analysis, you can use AI to:

• Monitor competitor online activities in real time.
• Collect data from various sources, including competitors’ websites and social media.
• Compare key performance indicators (KPIs) of competitors.
• Generate reports of key findings from competitive analysis.
• Identify patterns and trends in competitor content.
• Predict market trends.

With AI speeding up the time it takes to get through these data-driven activities, you can get through your competitor analysis and start implementing its insights that much faster.

Take Your Content Marketing Efforts to the Next Level with Competitor Analysis

By knowing what your competitors are up to — not to mention, what they’re missing — you can understand where you are and where you need to go to make your content stand out. 

Yes, competitor analysis can be a process, but with the help of AI, you can start collecting and analyzing the necessary data to stay ahead of the curve and at the top of the SERPs.

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